Overheard at ANA Media: 'Treat brand and performance as a single layer'

“Use a full-funnel approach to help connect what persuasion – or brand – and precision, or performance. It's a holistic approach. It's a marketing strategy that treats brand and performance as a single layer. It's about aligning a detailed understanding of the customer journey along messages that will resonate, and simultaneously answer consumers’ emotional, functional and transactional needs. For example, [perhaps] one of your colleagues says, ‘We used to have bespoke budgets for each layer of marketing, but the separate teams weren't necessarily working together.’ The way that marketing used to work is not the way that consumers are working today – it’s not how they think and experience things today. It's no longer separate tactics, separate strategies and separate budgets. It's a much more nonlinear, non-sequential experience in which consumers easily go from discovery to purchase in seconds, in a single experience. And we've got to be able to [support that and] provide them with value. How do we do that? Well, this full-funnel approach looks at the needs, the journey and the mindset. We need to address the full range of customer needs … All of this is wrapped up in a full-funnel strategy. To do that, you've got to be able to unify the customer journey and understand the different touchpoints and understand the consumers’ holistic journey so that you can place the brand and place the messages where they need to be. And that requires a robust analytics operation and capabilities. Prior it requires prioritizing the quality of data over the kind of the dirtiness of data that we've had in the past. And [you have to be] able to optimize your tech stack in order to do so.”

Erin Vitellaro, senior director, North America media, Molson Coors Beverage Company

“Consumers are experts at sniffing out anything that is fake or untrustworthy. [On top of that,] we’re facing unrelenting competition. We pride ourselves on being feisty brand challengers, but with that comes pressure, because we need to make sure that our investments in the marketplace are capturing more than their fair share. Boiling all of this down, it's just easy to say that when you're trying to get a consumer to notice you, sometimes reality bites. No longer can we just use taglines and TV ads, or a clever organic social strategy to get our consumers’ attention. We need to serve our content – the right content – in the right channels, at the right time, using the right data, to create experiences that will create a cultural resonance that reverberates across audiences and channels. The good news is, you really don't need to overthink this – it’s pretty simple. It boils down to winning the moments that matter by being present, being relevant and being memorable.”

Marla Skiko, global head of consumer connections, marketing, Ford Motor Company

“[As far as influencers are concerned,] you want somebody that can feel real – that can resonate with someone based on who they are, what their background is, where they come from. That's super important, and we're trying to do a lot of differentiation in that. I think the micro-influencers are the most important.”

Kristi Argyilan, senior vice-president of retail media, Albertsons Media Collective

“The promise of retail media – especially for the biggest retail media networks – is that we can be a scaled alternative in the digital media ecosystem. The stalwarts that we know – that we've been transacting with forever – are starting to falter. The marketplace, the data, everything is shifting under our feet. And retail media is squarely poised to be a different alternative.”

Dr. Karen Nelson-Field, founder and chief executive officer, Amplified Intelligence

“70 to 75% of Media Rating Council-accredited impressions get no attention. This is a real issue for lots of things, including reach-based [media] planning. If you think about the reach curve, it's kind of based on how many people are viewing, how many people have seen [an ad] across budget – but the volume that we get across reach now is not what we think. We are still [doing] planning on the premise that, for every single second, 100% of an audience watched across the entire course of the view. And that's not reality. Depending on the functionality of the format or platform, this decay can be even more significant. If you've ever heard of the concept of ‘not all reach is equal’ ... this is the premise of that, because a dollar spent here compared to a dollar spent there is very different in terms of its ability to deliver that reach … [Some people say,] ‘Let’s just build better creative.’ What is happening is the performance of your creative is tempered by the performance of the platform.”

Andy Kauffman, senior vice-president, marketing strategy and science, National Football League

“It's not lost on me that we are in an incredibly enviable position where our fans actually tattoo our brands on their bodies. We should all have that level of affinity. But we have to keep engaging those fans over and over again, season to season, as well as inside of the season. Now, all of this strategy is guided by a fan journey… data insights and the means to actively engage those fans in a very personal and orchestrated way. It's something we call ‘mass intimacy.’ That kind of has two sides to it – one is, ‘How can we put mass creative out that speaks to you in a very meaningful way?’ And then, ‘How can we also tailor our marketing to be far more personalized for you?’ In doing so, we need breakthrough creative and we need to orchestrate that across channels. That is ultimately fueled by data, but also an incredible ecosystem.”

Meghan Haslemann, vice-president, marketing, AutoNation

“When we clean up all our first-party data, there's work to be done to bring it to the next level [through data enrichment]. To me, this is the difference between just sending somebody an email with their first name and calling it ‘personalized’ or sending somebody a communication because you know that their son or daughter is graduating from high school and perhaps they're going to be in the market for a new car.”

Marc Pritchard, chief brand officer, Procter & Gamble

“I'd encourage you to think about how you can reset the bar – on understanding consumers through data analytics and digital technologies; on media reach … at the right ad frequencies; on advertising effectiveness by working with creative MVPs and [digital] ad tools. [Focus on] discerning what you can do best while challenging industry partners to explore new frontiers of innovation, because it's time to reset the bar on superior brand communication.”

Bob Liodice, chief executive officer, ANA

“Consumers need to be able to trust the vehicles they have been watching your messages on. And we have to be associated with … training in these particular areas, as well as industry headwinds, in terms of measurement accountability, programmatic media transparency, privacy and addressability, talent shortage, brand safety. [These are] issues that have been around for years and issues where there are a number of initiatives that are taking place, but initiatives that we really do need to make a difference [on] if we're going to get out of the incredible complexity of our business to optimize overall business decision-making.”

Tracy-Ann Lim, chief media officer, JPMorgan Chase

“Everything we do [in a compliance-focused field] needs to adhere to rules and requirements ... I suggest to you that you are all emowered to be safety tsars in your jobs ... Have a team that feels like owners, acts like owners. If you have the foundation ... you'll be ready for what's ahead. Being ready for what's ahead means putting safety first, but it does not need to come at the expense of creativity. Constraints, I think, are an incredible catalyst of creativity.”

Jerry Daykin, head of global media, Beam Suntory

“[When it comes to] inclusive marketing, listen to as many different perspectives as possible, understand intersectional people across our industry and what we need to do. And as far as focusing on socially conscious media, we are spending hundreds of billions of dollars on advertising. How much more of a difference can we make when we spend a bit more consciously? ... Your advertising is an investment not just in your brand – of course it needs to make your brand grow and develop – but also an investment in the media ecosystem of the future.”

Martin Bryan, chief sustainability officer, UM Worldwide

“Consumers want to see action. They want to see every one of our companies focused on decarbonization ... We have not, as an industry, aligned on how we measure [the environmental impact of] other elements in the ecosystem. We need to codify what those standards are, how we work with different partners and how to have an apples-to-apples comparison [of impact across media], so we can share that data back to our clients, with the goal of identifying ways we can reduce emissions and also identify the partners that... share the same values.”

Christy Cooper, global director of industry trade relations, Meta

“[When it comes to measuring the carbon footprint of media,] we're at a moment right now where we have different agencies that have different calculators. We have an opportunity to really come together and agree on what the best path should be. My plea to everyone is: let's do that [with Ad Net Zero]. It makes me think of another example – when I look at some of the ways that diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives launch, they're all very different. There are a lot of great initiatives happening, but I don't see one sort of unified metric going on. I'd love for us to come together as an industry and say, ‘We have a single metric or framework we're all aligned to it and will take actions to accomplish it.’”

Mark Prince, senior vice-president of economic empowerment, Dentsu Media

“Programmatic is huge, and we have to make sure there are diverse partners in that space because that’s where the budgets are going. There are various things [that may present challenges] – you know, sometimes it may be a tech stack issue, it may be a pipes issue, but we have to make sure that, on our side, [we’re considering] websites that are out there or inclusion lists … that we refer [to select diverse-owned partners].”

Christine Guilfoyle, president, SeeHer

“If you’re going to use humor [in advertising], by all means, use it as a tactic to cut through the clutter. But don’t cast someone as the butt of the joke … And don’t put women in the back as props.”